Straits of Hell (31 page)

“Okay. The highest number'll join us over by the big rock. Tell them to give 'em hell, but watch out for our guys and make their bombs count. This is our last shot, unless they can find somebody just bobbing around out of the line of fire to refuel and rearm 'em. And for God's sake, tell 'em not to smack into each other!”

“Ay, ay. I send it,” Seepy said.

Orrin nodded and banked to the right when he saw the formation begin to scatter. A few moments later he saw a Nancy with a big numeral “20” over the smaller “CV-3” emblazoned on its tail tuck in behind his left wing. “Okay,” he said to himself, “let's do some hunting of our own.”

Lower down, the battle seemed even more immense, if better defined, with ships flailing at one another with fire that seemed at first to be shockingly indiscriminate. He began to see that such was not necessarily the case, however, and the Allied ships, at least, were making an effort to stick together here and there in twos and threes for mutual support. No doubt that was made easier by their better communications, but that was literally going by the board—with their masts—as the battle persisted. He caught a glimpse of
Mithra
, identified by Jenks's pennant, tailed by another battlewagon. Both were pounding toward a tangled gaggle of fouled Dom heavies that gushed smoke and shot back at them as they approached, even while the two Impies fought both sides against smaller steamers, their masts askew, edging in from port and starboard. He waggled his wings and pointed, the only order his wingman needed to follow him in and attack one of the ships on the left side of the jumbled pack.

“Hang on, Seepy!” he called. “And stand by on the bomb release. I'm going to try to put two on that big mother with its bowsprit hung up in that other one's mizzen rigging. It looks to have the best angle to hit Jenks the hardest.

“Ay, ay. I stand-een by. I hose 'em with my Blitzer too? There ain't no Grikbirds in sight.”

“Not this time. Maybe later. Save your ammo in case some of the damn things do jump us. We couldn't have got them all.” Orrin pushed the stick forward and bored in. A few musket balls whizzed by, maybe a couple hitting, as he shouted “Drop!” The bombs fell away and he banked right to avoid any jinking his wingman might have to make. Looking down, he saw they'd hit
two
ships—their target, and another just beyond, directly alongside. The “20” plane got a hit and a near miss, and was clawing skyward as well, starting to bank right to join back up. He couldn't tell if they'd done any major damage to their target, although it had stopped firing for the moment, but the accidental hit had blown most of the upper stern and mizzen off the other ship, and flames surged upward amid the cloud of splinters and fragments of men that their bomb had thrown into the sky.

“She'll burn,” Seepy declared, also looking back and down. “Prob'ly burn the one beside her too, they don't shove her off. Either way, they be too busy for much shootin' for a while.”

Orrin silently agreed, already looking for another target. “What the hell?” he suddenly blurted, his eyes catching sight of a dismasted hulk, close to the great rocky isle. The thing was shot to
pieces
, with only the stump of a toppled funnel gushing gray smoke. It was also visibly low in the water, but still, somehow, underway. What was more, it was towing a smaller, equally battered ship at a meager pace. He blinked disbelief as he realized the thing that really caught his attention was the ragged, practically shredded Stars and Stripes streaming from the stump of its foremast.

“Jeez! That's gotta be
Simms
or
Tindal
, and that can only be
Icarus
she's got in tow!”

“Looks bad,” Seepy agreed. “An' there's Doms comin' up to finish 'em off!”

Orrin scanned the battle near the cripples. A few Allied ships were close, but there were more Doms in the way and they'd never get there in time. He banked harder right. “We'll see about that,” he ground out grimly.

//////
USS
Simms

T
he gallant DD was a smoldering, shattered wreck. All her masts were shot away, the tangle of rigging still being cleared by the 'Cat sailors who worked the sails, forming roving damage-control parties who chopped at taut cables with axes and cutlasses. Some worked to trim the dangerous, jagged splinters jutting in every direction from the bulwarks, and the blood-soaked deck beneath their feet, the latter making it dangerous to even walk about.

The hull was logy with barely controlled flooding, and only the heroic Lemurian pumps and semiwatertight compartmentalization had kept it afloat this long. The engine and boilers still labored valiantly, with little complaint, preserved for the most part by the armor belt. But the armor was still relatively light, never intended to withstand so much punishment for so long; it was sprung or even shot away in a number of places and its protection had been compromised. Just as bad, after all the high-speed steaming the ship had done, fuel was becoming a problem.
Not only was it depleted, but the bunkers lining the inside of the hull were leaking oil as quickly as they let seawater in to contaminate what remained. Seven guns were operational on the port side, currently unengaged and facing the great stony wall of Malpelo. There were only five guns left in the starboard battery; the rest either dismounted or rendered unloadable by muzzle strikes. It didn't much matter.
Simms
barely had enough gunners and Marines left to serve those few. The wardroom looked more like a slaughterhouse than a sick bay, and the seriously wounded had overflowed it to a degree that there was little point in taking more below. Many just lay on the main deck where they'd been dragged to the illusory safety of the creaking bulwarks, dosed with gulps of seep, and quickly bandaged by well-meaning but harried shipmates.

But the five remaining starboard guns were still in action, firing in “local control” with the new “friction primers,” which were little tubes filled with an explosive compound and ignited by briskly yanking a coarse, sealed wire through the mix. Remarkably stable, efficient, and very nearly waterproof, they'd been reinvented by one of
Mizuki Maru
's rescued prisoners of war working in the Maa-ni-laa Naval Arsenal. First manufactured in the Filpin Lands, they were one of the few innovations that might've made it to the “Dom Front” even before they went west. Intended for the field artillery, the Navy had snapped some up to replace the dangerous, smoldering linstocks used to back up the electric igniters, or when guns fired independently. Like now.

Fred Reynolds staggered up the companionway, dragging another pair of powder pass boxes, just as a gunner pulled a lanyard to ignite one of the new primers and sent an exploding shell crashing into an approaching Dom 'wagon about four hundred yards distant. It had just come barreling out of the tighter press beyond and seemed intent on closing. Fred shook his head with a curse.
Simms
had been downwind of the battle all day, and the titanic roar of the entire action had been a continuous, bone-jangling presence. Now, his hearing was so far gone, his head so full of what felt like sloshy wet cotton, he barely heard the shot. The shell detonated amid the enemy's headrails, shivering the foremast with splinters and shards of hot iron, but for all the notice the huge ship took, it might've been her first hit of the day. Fred looked around. Except for them and
Icarus
, under tow behind them and in even worse shape than
Simms
, there was nothing left moving out on this end of the battle.
“Why's that one . . .” He paused, seeing another Dom heavy following in the first one's wake and realized it wasn't alone. “Why're they picking on
us
? There's a whole big-ass battle going on. Don't they have anything better to do? Jeez! We wouldn't be a threat to a rowboat right now, if it left us alone!”

“Gangway!” Kari gasped irritably below him, burdened by pass boxes of her own. He jumped and staggered dumbly toward the gun that just fired, even as the one beside it roared and trundled back. Absently, he tried to pop his ears again, but it was no use. One of the 'Cat gunners—a Marine—grimly took one of his boxes and slung him an empty one. The ship shuddered from a hit forward—the Dom had a pair of big bow chasers—and Fred's knees buckled. Straightening, he staggered to the next gun, aft, even as a powder-stained youngling bolted past him with two pass boxes, each containing a pair of exploding shells.

“Shit! I'm useless!” he railed aloud, realizing the “kid,” half his size, was carrying twice the weight.

“Move it!” Kari snapped behind him.

“What's the point?” he demanded miserably, glancing back. Her flight suit was covered in blood from helping move the injured, and it was matted in the fur that showed. He looked much the same, for the same reason. Both had found helmets and still wore their goggles to protect their eyes from splinters and grit. He wasn't hurt, that he knew of, but he was
so
tired. Flying airplanes didn't do much to keep one in shape for this sort of thing. “We're just getting in the way!”

“You gettin' in
my
way!” she snapped, and he glared at her. His only experience aboard a ship in combat had been as
Walker
's bridge talker. Tabby was technically a communications officer, but she'd never actually done anything but fly with him. With
Simms
's comm out, there'd seemed nothing else for either of them to do, so he'd volunteered to help the youngling ordnance handlers who'd been decimated along with everyone else.

“That's what I mean,” he said with a near hysterical laugh as he waved his empty box at another youngling racing past. “I'm in your way, and you're in their way.” Then he pointed at the Dom ships bearing down. “And none of it's going to matter a few minutes from now.”

“Lieuten-aant.” Fred barely heard, after yet another gut-shaking shot. “Ensign Faask.”

They turned and saw Captain Ruik standing between two of the guns, trying to stay out of their crew's way as they feverishly worked. It was the only way he could see anything, but he didn't look good at all. He'd lost his helmet and was having trouble with his telescope since a Dom solid shot had taken his hand off, halfway up his forearm earlier in the fight. He'd had the arm bound and lashed to his body, high across his chest, but that was about it. He'd remained on deck throughout the action. When Fred spoke to him before, he'd merely joked weakly that he'd have to get Prime Factor Bates of the Empire of the New Britain Isles to give him the name of the gunmaker who'd built the long-barreled pistol the one-armed man used for sport shooting.

“Sir!” Fred and Kari chorused.

Ruik managed a pained grin and beckoned them over with his glass. “Please,” he said. “With Lieuten-aant Gaal wounded”—(Fred knew Gaal was still alive, but with a big percentage of the top of his head knocked off, he was more than just “wounded”)—“and . . . out of the fight,” Ruik continued, “and all my other officers either dead or occupied below, I'd raather the only other naval
officers
aboard refrain from tasks such as you are engaged in, laudable though they may be. I've learned that, in the Navy, the example officers set at times like this can be more important than anything they actually
do
,” he added wryly.

“How important can doin' nothin' be?” Kari demanded, antsy to deliver her load.

Ruik blinked disappointment. “I assure you, Ensign Faask, standing calmly on the quarterdeck, under the circumstances, is not ‘nothing,' and seeing us accomplish it, however challenging, helps others keep their composure.”

Fred gestured helplessly around. “Sure, but . . . so? What do you want us to do? Gaal said this would be a help.”

“Lieuten-aant Gaal was—is—a very practical person with little concern for appearances. In our current situation, I believe keeping up ‘appearances' is the greatest service we can still render to this crew. You may not credit it, but both of you are warmly regarded throughout the Alliance. I'd appreciate it if you'd join me here, and try to affect that things are not nearly as desperate as they seem.”

Fred scratched at the grime that had accumulated in his sparse beard. “Oh. Okay.”

“Besides,” Ruik said, nodding out to the west, where the greater battle raged, “there are sights to see that you will never forget, if you survive this day, and I suspect things may soon take an interesting turn. Look.”

Beyond the nearest Dom 'wagon, that looked a little worse for wear now, with dark smoke beginning to billow from beneath her fo'c'sle and behind the gunports along her starboard bow, a new intensity had quickened the fight.

“My God, the
Makky-Kat
's joined the fight!” Fred exclaimed. Big as she was, he could barely see her through the war-fogged turmoil. She was more than a mile away, churning through the forest of shot, fractured masts, flailing canvas in red and white, shell-torn, smoke-streaming funnels, gun flashes, and ragged smoke. Still, from what they could see, the destruction she was wreaking, almost effortlessly it seemed, with her modern guns and many heavy smoothbores, was an awe-inspiring sight. She gave an impression of stubborn indomitability as profound as the great, rocky isle—but an awful lot of Dom ships were starting to turn on her. . . .

“I hope Ahd-mi-raal Lelaa don't beat up our home too much,” Kari murmured.

Simms
jolted heavily again from a number of hits, and everyone fell to the ruptured deck or clutched the disintegrating rail. Geysers of water crashed down on top of them. The Dom liner had begun a turn, exposing more of the perhaps fifty guns that pierced either side.

“Here it comes,” Fred exclaimed, probably louder than he'd intended, as he clambered to his feet. He mentally excused his volume with his deafness and the stupendous, continuous roar.

“Look!” someone cried, and they caught a quick glimpse of a pair of swooping Nancys. Bombs detached and plummeted down as the planes climbed and turned. Both weapons from one plane impacted the farther ship, and an instant after the initial flash, the whole thing bulged like an over-inflated balloon, popping with a catastrophic ball of orange fire and a towering white mushroom streaked with black. Thousands of unidentifiable fragments slashed the sea for hundreds of yards, and a nearly intact foremast slammed down on the closest 'wagon, toppling masts and spars. That ship had been hit by the closer plane as well, if less destructively, on the port side, throwing a smaller cloud of debris away
from the ship. It was still turning, though, and Fred clenched his teeth, waiting for the final, cataclysmic broadside that would surely erase poor
Simms
and
Icarus
.

Well, if appearances are all I've got left,
Fred thought,
I'm damned if I'm gonna flinch!
He looked at Kari when his Lemurian friend—the very best friend he ever had—found his hand with hers and blinked an indecipherable measure of fondness at him. He felt lucky that they'd had that long. But the end didn't come, and he haltingly turned to stare back at the Dom amid a tentatively rising flood of cheers.

“They got her port paddle box!” Ruik managed with an understated tone of satisfaction. “And look! She can't control her turn! She's heading straight for that other ship!”

The “other” ship was one they hadn't seen, blocked by the pair of Doms, but coming up fast beyond them.

“She's ours! A
big
one!” came another growing chorus, and Fred suddenly realized that, faced with a possibly equal opponent instead of a pair of virtually helpless ones, the gun's crews preparing to finish
Simms
had stampeded to port, to fight the more pressing threat they couldn't avoid. It wouldn't help them. Already, none of the port guns would bear on the intruder, which unleashed a stunning broadside of its own, directly into the Dom's vulnerable bow. More splinters flew,
huge
splinters, and cables parted and lashed at the sky. A nearly intact longboat cartwheeled away from the waist, ricocheting off the funnel, before flopping, upside down, in the sea.

“She's struck!” came a delirious screech.

Struck?
Fred thought.
Surrendered? Naw. Probably just had her flag shot away
. He didn't believe it. But when the now severely damaged enemy ship of the line all of a sudden frantically reversed her engine and still didn't fire at anything, it began to dawn on him. It never before occurred to him that a Dom warship, any more than a Grik, might just . . . quit. But as the moments slipped by and no fire came, he realized it must be true.

“Damage report!” Ruik commanded.

“We're losin' her, Skipper,” the blood-soaked quartermaster at the helm stated simply, her ear close to the voice tube from engineering. “Those last shots, they was nothin' left to stop 'em, an' the boiler room's floodin' fast. No boilers, no pumps.”

Ruik closed his eyes to hide a pain worse than his arm. When he opened them again, they shone with an inner light. “Right standard rudder. Take us alongside that hulk.” He raised his voice. “All hands, draw small arms and prepare to board. No firing unless fired upon, but kill anyone who resists.”

“What then?” Fred asked, still a little stunned.

“Then, Lieu-ten-aant Reynolds, we will rejoin the fight from the captured ship!”

Their providential rescuers were none other than HIMS
Mars
and Admiral Hibbs himself, returned to the fight. His own prize crew joined the entire crews of
Simms
and
Icarus
as they gained the deck of the Dom 'wagon without resistance. There
had
been a struggle, however, because there were no officers left aboard. Having just witnessed the traumatic detonation of their consort, and helplessly facing certain destruction themselves, the crew had rioted and thrown their officers over the side. Fred knew that battles drew flashies—and other voracious denizens—into even tighter concentrations that they were usually found in this savage sea, and doubted the Dom officers had lasted long enough to rise to the surface for a final, panicked breath.